Enterprise hits and misses - marketing forecasts, supply chain chaos and Jon's m... - JOYK Joy of Geek, Geek News, Link all geek

Jon’s gone AWOL! Honestly, we turned our backs for five minutes and he was off into the wild! If you spot him, do let us know. In his absence, here’s a slightly shorter version of Hits and Misses until the maestro returns from his frolics.

Lead story - We can’t rewind, we’ve gone too far

Some sectors have seen enormous change wrought by the impact of the pandemic; others have sailed through relatively intact. Where do we find marketing in the Vaccine Economy? Upbeat and optimistic, according to Salesforce’s latest research, although to be fair, that’s really part of the job description for a successful marketer anyway…

That said, there’s a lot to be found of interest in the State of Marketing report, as Stuart reports in Video killed the radio star; will it do the same to some marketers? Salesforce data points to new priorities for marketing in the Vaccine Economy. For example:

90% of respondents say that their digital engagement strategies have changed to some degree, with more than half of those (48% of total respondents) saying that it’s been a complete change. Meanwhile 89% say their marketing channel mix has changed with video emerging top of the ranking of channels delivering the biggest increase in marketing value over the past years. This has undoubtedly been driven by the universal cancellation of real world engagements, such as conferences and seminars, and their shift online.

But one universal truth remains constant:

The most important goal for marketing is to meet customer experience expectations. Eighty percent of marketers polled recognise this, saying that customer experience is the key competitive differentiator. That’s the good news. The less good news? Seventy-two percent of them say that meeting customer expectations is now more difficult than it was a year ago. In large part, this has been a side-effect of channel shift to digital and a resulting evolution of expectation. So, today, approaching two-thirds (61%) of customers anticipate spending more time online than they did pre-pandemic and they expect the organizations they deal with to keep up and advance their digital initiatives accordingly.

Bottom line - reasons to be cheerful, but fresh challenges ahead!

diginomica picks - top stories on diginomica this week

Our pitiful supply chains and how business/tech must respond - a magnum opus in two parts from Brian as he casts a critical eye over the lamentable state of supply chain infrastructure and offers up his checklist of ‘things that must be done’ ASAP. As he notes:

Your supply chains are getting hammered by logistic, natural, economic and other forces, many of which are far beyond your firm’s control. Nonetheless, your firm must devise processes and alter systems to mitigate the effect of these if it is to remain profitable and viable.

Apple's child protections open a Pandora's Box of future privacy violations - Apple’s about to put the old cliche about the road to hell being paved with good intentions to a real world test. Trouble is, it’s a test that could well have enormous, negative long-term privacy implications for us all, as Kurt argues:

If Apple is overwhelmed by the amount of content meeting its trigger criteria, it could easily end up misreporting innocent photos…Apple is guaranteed to offend someone in attempting to satisfy conflicting goals, but they are both worthy objectives. Prepare to be outraged and see some fine-tuning as flaws in Apple’s system are revealed and fixed.

Twitter is mostly identifying racist tweets using tech and says ID verification unlikely to stop abuse - Derek’s also tackling a very modern ethical challenge in the form of racist abuse online, this time the use of Twitter by vile scum throwing out filth towards English footballers for daring to miss some penalties. Twitter’s made a positive move, but this is a match that’s going to a lot of extra time:

However, we also have to be honest that the progress we will be able to make alone would be magnified by greater interventions across the board. As long as racism exists offline, we will continue to see people try and bring these views online - it is a scourge technology cannot solve alone. Everyone has a role to play - including the government and the football authorities - and we will continue to call for a collective approach to combat this deep societal issue.